by R.E. Rowe
Chapter 4
Jayden and Parker hurried back to Jayden’s house, and then sat on the floor in his room with computers in their laps for a couple hours until Parker’s cell phone rang.
“Speak . . . You what?” Parker roared, glancing at Jayden with his eyes popping. “We’ll be right over.” He tapped his cell phone and tucked it in his pants pocket.
“Nora?” Jayden asked.
“Yep,” replied Parker. “She fixed the mini.”
“Already?” Unbelievable, Jayden thought with a grin.
Parker nodded. “She wants to show us something, but it has to be in her room where she can run her hide-the-babe bot.”
They bolted back to Parker’s house, made a beeline to Nora’s room, and thumped on her cherry wood door.
“Enter!” Nora shouted.
Jayden followed Parker into her room as if they were a couple of teenage SWAT team guys.
Nora’s jasmine-scented perfume knocked the wind out of Jayden . . . yet again.
“Hola, Jay,” Nora said with a grin.
Jayden spied his dad’s mini-tablet, powered off, near the side of her desk. He gave her a disinterested gaze, but that didn’t stop his stomach from rumbling. His face reddened. “Hey.”
Parker grabbed the tablet. “You figured it out?”
“All fixed,” she replied. “Drex the dragon-bot scorched the viruses. Nasty ones too. I’ll give you a demo.” Nora grinned as she stared at the computer screens on her desk and tap-danced with her fingers across the keyboard.
Jayden stood behind her, peering at the computer monitors on her desk that were full of rapidly changing information. It all looked like gibberish to him.
“Watch,” she said, then typed: “vlaic://385647n77932w.”
Jayden recognized the text from the tablet when it had first gone nuts.
Nora's computer screen instantly filled with the same weird symbols as Jayden had witnessed in his room. The same ear test tones blasted from her computer speakers as the symbols randomly changed all over her computer screen.
She tapped a new sequence of keystrokes, causing her computer to blast three low-pitched beeps. The random dance of symbols stopped, and the screen went blank. A new sequence of numbers appeared in the center of her screen:
37 14 06 115 48 40
>>
“What does it mean?” Jayden asked.
Nora glanced at him over her shoulder. “It’s a prompt—”
“For what?” Parker asked.
“Not sure. But I think the numbers you see are Global Positioning Satellite coordinates.”
“Like the navigation system in my dad’s car?” Jayden asked.
Nora nodded. “Sort of.”
“GPS coordinates to where, Nora?” Parker.
Nora typed out a quick Internet search on her desk computer. “Well . . .” Nora sighed. “The coordinates correspond to Area 51 in Nevada.”
No way. Jayden’s jaw dropped, and Parker’s eyes went wide. The super-secret military base where people think aliens are stored in freezers?
“How’d you fix it?” Jayden asked. “I thought my dad’s tablet was destroyed.”
Nora grinned. “Don’t be an idiot. It wasn’t easy. I used a distributed Internet crack. Once I found the public key, I figured out the private one. Whoever they are, they’re using asymmetric encryption, nothing too intense. They must’ve figured I’d be a dirtball.”
Jayden tried to think of something intelligent to say. Nothing came to mind.
“Close your mouth, or you’ll catch insectos voladores,” she said to him.
Jayden eyed Parker, then shrugged.
“Insects,” Parker whispered to Jayden. “You’ll catch flying insects.”
Jayden returned his attention to Nora. “How do you know all this computer stuff?”
“Dad’s startup became her elementary school,” Parker whispered. “He hired an MIT Ph.D. student to home-school her on-site while everyone else worked on programming. Paid him a mint too.”
“I can hear you,” she said, exaggerating each word. “And Dad didn’t pay him a mint.”
Nora was not only smart, but she was also a magician. Somehow she always managed to turn the ground below Jayden’s feet to melting rubber.
“You know the numbers that were in your browser?” she asked.
Parker tapped on his cell phone and held it up. A picture of Jayden’s dad’s tablet was on the phone. He zoomed in on one line: “vlaic://385647n77932w.”
“These?” he asked.
“Those are the ones,” Nora said. “The numbers happen to be the GPS coordinates for Langley, Virginia.”
“Why’s that important?” Jayden asked Parker.
“CIA headquarters,” Parker replied before Nora could.
Jayden shook his head. In his world, the CIA stood for spies and blockbuster movies, not encrypted websites, GPS coordinates, and Area 51. It was like taking a skateboard to go surfing. It made no sense at all.
“See the letters?” Nora pointed at the screen. “‘vlaic’?”
Jayden nodded.
“Ring a bell?”
Jayden peered closer. “Nope.”
“It’s an acronym spelled out backwards,” she said. “You know, in reverse. VLAIC is really CIALV . . . for CIA Langley, Virginia.”
Dang, she's good, Jayden thought.
“Once I figured out they're using GPS coordinates, I used trial and error. It turned out the GPS coordinates for Cheyenne Mountain was the private key I needed to decrypt the encrypted data. The rest is history.”
“So what does it mean?” Jayden asked her.
“No idea,” she replied sharply.
Suddenly, the numbers changed and displayed a message:
36 06 23 112 06 23
>> Pick up 0321
“No way,” Nora said. “Updates. It looks like a pick up time to me. Maybe, three twenty-one a.m.? I’d guess it’s a way to communicate when and where.”
“Now all we need to figure out is the what,” Parker said.
The information changed again:
24 33 33 81 47 2
>> Pick up 0258
Parker leaned in for a closer look. “That’s insane. Someone is doing pick-ups and using an encrypted website to communicate?”
The display suddenly filled with fifty sets of GPS coordinates and the message changed. The hairs on the back of Jayden’s neck tingled as he studied the last four lines of the new information:
World Corp Code Red
Space Expeditionary Combat Command
Recruit Pickup
Next 5
0400
Password Required
>>
“World Corp?” Parker asked. “The gaming company?”
“Space Expeditionary Combat Command?” Jayden asked. “What does their game have to do with anything?”
“Still no clue,” Nora replied. “Looks like a password is needed for something.”
“Maybe World Corp is distributing a new game version to secret beta testers,” Parker said.
“Hey,” Jayden said. “I bet the CIA reference has something to do with their new game.” He watched Nora as she used one of her other computers to convert each of the new GPS coordinates to locations.
She read them out loud, “Big Bear Solar Observatory, Foothill Observatory, Griffith Observatory, Stony Ridge Observatory, Santa Cruz Observatory—”
“Santa Cruz Observatory?” Jayden asked. “That’s not far from here.”
Nora raised one eyebrow. “Santa Cruz Observatory at four a.m.”
“We have to get our hands on their new game,” Parker said.
“Tomorrow morning?” Jayden asked Nora.
“Looks like it,” Nora replied.
“You guys thinking what I’m thinking?” Parker asked them. “It’s only a two-hour bike ride. Ninety minutes up. Thirty minutes back.”
“Are you serious?” Jayden asked.
“Count me out
,” Nora said, and twisted her face. “I’m not getting up at two-thirty in the morning to peddle up a mountain road. Besides, I have no clue what their password could be . . . No way, Newt.”
“Come on, sis, please?” Parker grumbled. “You’ll be able to figure it out faster than we can.” His voice climbed a notch. “I need my sister’s help.” He sounded pathetic, but it always worked when he begged.
Nora smirked. “No can do. I have a game algorithm to decrypt. I’ll be busy all night.”
“How about for another hundred?” Parker asked.
Jayden gazed at him with narrowed brows. Is he crazy? Probably, but Jayden figured getting a new World Corp game at a secret location in the middle of the night was seriously cool. It would be a major rush to be one of the first to play it.
Nora stopped laughing.
“How about three hundred?” Parker asked. He leaned toward her and rubbed his hands together, moving his head in the direction of one of the computer boxes. “You know you need more memory. And we need your help.”
Nora glanced over at her computers as though she were calculating how much it was going to cost to upgrade them. Twenty seconds had passed before she sighed. “I guess I’m in. Where you going to get that kind of cash?”
“Jayden’s dad’s good for it.” Parker winked at Jayden.
“Ah, geez.” Jayden groaned, but he wasn’t going to argue. A midnight bike ride with Nora was definitely worth the cash.
Game on!
